


Paint Me A Picture

by Wanderbird



Series: Fragments [6]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Gen, Master Sword (Legend of Zelda), Standalone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:00:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23687296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wanderbird/pseuds/Wanderbird
Summary: Link glared down at the Master Sword where it sat, taunting him as he caught his breath.Fuck this, he thought. Fuck you. All I want is my stupid painting.Works as a standalone, and set shortly before the events of Divine Beast
Relationships: Link & Pikango
Series: Fragments [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1525865
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	Paint Me A Picture

Pikango was nice.

Cheerful, unassuming, always delighted and surprised to see him. It was quite the coincidence that Link and the painter kept ending up in all the same places—but was it, really? Hyrule wasn’t as vast as all that, he’d learned, and it wasn’t exactly safe to stay outside of towns or stables.

Pikango wasn’t even a particularly good painter.   
Or at least, Link didn’t think so. The colors were bright, but the outlines indistinct and hard to make out, the lighting vague yet unyieldingly strong. Maybe he was missing something. But Pikango seemed to take such joy in it, he couldn’t help but keep quiet and enjoy the scenery anyway. It was touching, really, when Pikango warned him not to get close, when Link showed him the pictograph from near Woodland Stable. The painter actually seemed to… care about him. Link had been beginning to wonder if anyone did, for longer than it took for him to fix whatever problems ailed them. Even the ghosts of the former champions didn’t talk to him very often. If Link was honest with himself, they were probably only helping him because they wanted Ganon dead. Why else would he still not remember more than a handful of conversations with them?

Link bought a house in Hateno.

He wasn’t sure why, exactly. Wasn’t he in enough of a hurry already, what with the whole Calamity thing? But then, Zelda had lasted on her own for this long, and Link was pretty sure by now that he’d already died for this cause at least once. He wouldn’t have needed a _hundred years_ to heal from an injury, no matter how bad it was—Zelda could wait while he took the chance to live a little.   
He bought a painting from Pikango to liven the place up.   
Sure, the art wasn’t the prettiest or the most accurate he’d ever seen. But it had an energy to it, an energy lacking from all the photograms on his Sheikah Slate. Life. And more importantly, it was an image of the world _now,_ from the eyes of someone who didn’t have the civilization of before the Calamity to compare it to. Where Impa and Purah’s depictions of the present world had all felt grim and faded, Pikango’s paintings made it feel young! Lively! Full of hope!

Or at least, Link thought they did.   
Maybe he was deluding himself after all. Maybe he _was_ just a failure of a hero, who failed a hundred years ago and was still putting off even _trying_ to fix his mistakes now.   
Pathetic.

He’d stared at that painting for _hours._

“Link,” a voice rumbled.   
His shoulders slumped. Right. The stupid sword, sitting in the stupid stone, _taunting_ him.   
“Link,” the Great Deku Tree sounded resigned. “You’re going to need that sword.”  
“ _The sword doesn’t want me,”_ Link signed, not even bothering to open his eyes. _“You saw. I failed. Find a better champion.”  
_ “There is no-one else.” Hylia, Link wished he could just shut that voice _out._ Shut it out, climb back to the Shrine of Resurrection, and sleep until he woke up in a better world. But—no. The Great Deku Tree’s voice made his very bones echo with its sound, and the fog of its woods refused to let him leave. “Link. I, too, am surprised that it does not think you worthy. But you will not _become_ worthy by sitting here on your bottom. Time is of the essence!”

Link rolled his eyes. “ _She’s held him off for a hundred years already. I’m not sure what she needs me for.”  
_ “Then I will remind you again:” The Great Deku Tree was impossibly patient, beginning its explanation again in that slow, soothing voice. “Zelda cannot banish Ganon alone. They are each embodiments of one piece of the Triforce; and as such they are balanced. You—”

“I _know_!” Link would have shouted it if he could. As it was, his voice gave out partway through the word. He signed the rest of it. “ _I know what she needs me for. I’m not an idiot. I’m just… tired.”_ Tired. Gods did that feel insufficient to describe the depths of his exhaustion, of his frustration. _“And I know I’ll need the Master Sword to do it, but the Master Sword doesn’t_ want _me anymore, and I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know if I_ can _fix it. I just wish…”_ he gave a sigh. _“I wish, for once in my life, that I could just do whatever I want to do.”_

“What do you want to do?”   
There it was. The question, calm as the ages and without judgement, from this being that felt so familiar it killed Link to look at him.

_“I just want to go home.”  
_ “Home?”   
_“I want to go home, and look at my painting, and make some friends who know me as more than just the hero of legend. I want to talk to Kass and show him where I live and tell him that he’s welcome anytime. I want to find Pikango again and take him here, I mean this place is_ beautiful! _I want him to paint the skies encircled by fog, and the violet shadows and the happy moss under my feet, and I want to take that painting home and keep it with me always.”_ Link opened his eyes at last, scrubbing at them with one dirty hand. _“I want to show people something beautiful. I want to rediscover this place that is so clearly a piece of me, and do it without judgement, without all the people who knew me before. I don’t even recognize who I was before! I want everyone to stop_ pushing _it on me, I want to be left alone, to live in a village with happy people and happy kids and cuccoos and have the biggest danger in my life be the couple bokoblins at the end of the field. Just for a while.”_ When Link sat up, there were tears on his cheeks and there was snot on his nose, and he looked up at the tree like it held all the answers in the world. _“Is that so selfish?”_ he asked.

“Link…” That sigh was the rustling of leaves and the laughter of koroks, lazy wind in branches which swayed in the fog.   
“ _It is, isn’t it?”_ Link laughed, loud and sharp. _“I’m not cut out to be a hero. I told you so.”_

“No.” The Deku Tree whistled. “You are wrong. It is not selfish. Or if it selfish, it is far from being cruel, or evil.”   
_“I—”  
_ “There is someone whose company I think might benefit you greatly, Link. He felt much the same as you do, in his time. I will ask one of my koroks to give you something of his. But in the meantime—” the Great Deku Tree’s mouth twisted in some approximation of a smile. “I have an idea as to how we might convince the sword to accept you.”

* * *

The korok trials… worked.

Link had had his doubts at first, that these little creatures could actually pose enough of a physical challenge—but they managed more than well enough. By the time Link got back to the Master Sword, he was sweaty and dirty, unarmored and covered in cuts and bruises. He glared down at the sword. _If this doesn’t work…_ he growled internally.  
But it did.   
He grasped the sword as firmly as he could, and _pulled._ And kept pulling. And kept pulling. He ignored the pains lancing up his arms and into his body, his whole vision narrowing to nothing but that _stupid bloody sword—_  
It moved.   
It moved, and Link was already gasping for breath, his eyes too blurry to see anything but a glowing shape until he finally drew it from the stone.

“Here, Mr. Hero!” A little red korok stood next to him when his vision returned, only knee-high at the top of its head. “I found it! I found the thing from Mr. Wolf!”

Link stared. It took him a long moment to understand what the korok with saying, the _shing_ of the sword still ringing in his ears. “ _Mr… Wolf?”_ It didn’t look like a wolf. It just looked like some kind of relative of Sheikah technology, made of ancient white pottery. Link had no idea what it was supposed to be, all rounded out by rain and time. It looked like a part of some sort of rod, maybe? A capsule? And poking out from the inside was an odd, horseshoe-shaped instrument, like a kind of flute with beads on its little leather binding.   
“Very good. The device is old, and not in great repair,” the Great Deku Tree spoke. “If I were you, I’d take it to Spring of Courage, and soak it in the waters. And then… who knows? Perhaps you will be able to play it for your friend Pikango.”

The Tree clearly knew more than it was saying.   
Still, anything was worth a shot, and he didn’t know where else to go. So Link thrust the Master Sword into the scabbard he’d found at the roots of the Great Deku Tree, swung the whole thing on his back, and got ready to leave. “ _Fine,”_ he growled. Maybe he could take a photogram with his Slate, and Pikango could paint from that—  
No.   
The anger trained out of him in a rush. No. But when this was all over, when he was finally free… maybe he really could bring Pikango with him to this beautiful grove, and scream at the mists until they let them both pass.

For now, he would head to the Spring of Courage.

**Author's Note:**

> ...I wanted to do something with Pikango like I did with Kass, but that was only a couple hundred words and lacking context, so I also covered the Master Sword. I then had an idea for the mechanics of how Wolf!Link ends up with him later, so... I got a little carried away again. But only a little?  
> Anyway.  
> I hope you folks enjoy this, regardless of whether you've read my other Zelda shorts or not. It was certainly cathartic to write! 
> 
> Stay safe! And good luck!  
> -Ent


End file.
